As you're looking at competitors logos but also logos for inspiration, not that
you're gonna rip them off but just to see what's out there. You might want to save
the images to your local hard drive and then put them in a board.
There's another trick though that you might want to try. If you're on a website and you don't want to
have to download an image as a file. You can actually just hit Print Screen on the
keyboard on PCs and on MACs, you can press Command-Shift 4 and then click and
drag an area and it will copy and paste the content of whatever is on the screen
onto image file on the desktop. But on the PC's, 'it won't paste it anywhere as
a file yet. You have to place it into a program. So if you're on a MAC, you can
actually just click and drag after holding Command-Shift 4 and just
create a bunch of files and bring them in to say, Photoshop or Illustrator.
On the PC like I have here, if I just hit print screen, right now it's in the
clipboard and then you can go to Photoshop if you have that. Go to file, New and click
OK and go to Edit, Paste and you can see my entire screen here because I'm
recording in Camtasia. What you could do is it just select it there and let's just say
I was interested in looking at this logo. Click and drag around it with the
selection tool and you can copy and paste it but what I like to do is just Control J
on the PC or Command J on the MAC and paste that onto a new layer.
Now you have that and the idea is that you just collect a bunch of different images
and just a brainstorm. This could be for competitive research but it also could just
be just to get ideas and it doesn't have to be other logos. It can be a magazine, a
YouTube video, something where you saw an image and just maybe get
inspiration from it for a logo. Now if you do that in Illustrator,
if you go to Edit, Paste, it's going to paste it as a raster image. Obviously, you have
it all here. So you would need to... you could resize it down a bit. I like to just go to
Photoshop first. You can bring it over into Illustrator and just keep it off
the art board there as inspiration if you want. You could save the entire board
like, say you had a bunch different images here for ideas and save it as a PNG or
JPEG or PSD, any kind of image file that you can place into Illustrator. Just go to
file, Place and you could have the finalized version over there for inspiration as
you create your illustrator logo over here. So that's just a tip when you're looking
for inspiration and ideas and see what's been done before as far as logos but
also just different images. You can use screen capture techniques on the MAC or
the PC to turn them into images to look at later. Thanks.